"The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on."

Tape Extracts:

[Opens with the story of Libby Cantrell as told by Don Chambers as Recorded at the Show]

Don Chambers: Yeah, obscurity has been...when I was in college my professor Judy McWillie used that description for my paintings that I like to obscure things and I'd never thought about that before. But it is it is part of the way I work and that goes back to that that Tarkovsky idea of poetics and film, that's not. It's a little bit of different from that. But the idea of weaving words or images together in a way that there's plenty of gaps in the weave that need to be filled in by someone. By the intelligence of another person, the person who's coming to it, so the piece remains open.

Obscuring is another way of doing that. Make somebody else do some work too. I don't want to give it all away. I don't have anything to give all away either. I don't have a message. I'm not interested in messages.

Ideas are always, the big ideas are abstract and wily and and hard. The big ideas you shouldn't be able to look at all at once, you can't. We're too close to em'. They are very large animals and we are getting a little glimpse of their hind leg and then of their their main and then the eyeball if you get lucky one day, but you're just moving around this really big thing that it'll take you your lifetime to get to understanding the sublime mystery of the world and how we're here, what are we doing here, all the basic questions these are giant, giant questions and they're the things. Art making is just moving around that big giant beast. And don't get stuck in its mouth.

Garrett Tiedemann: Did you start off as a painter?

Don: I did. I started off, I went to school in South Carolina and then in Georgia and I got a degree in painting and printmaking and worked as an artist for a bit of the 90s. I got a few grants. I did this collaborative piece with sociologists. We went down to Florida and interviewed retired circus performers and I photographed all their like scrapbooks and personal memorabilia. And then I would kind of mess them up. I did installations based on those. And we also had a book of interviews of all those performers. But I was playing music because I was in Athens and that just kind of took over. It was just funner.

There was a point where I felt like I had to decide whether I was going to go one way or the other in my in my 30s and I was like alright, I'm just gonna music for now and let's see what happens. But I keep coming back to it. I had a painting show last year. First time in 10 years. But I keep, I've always done visual stuff, but I hadn't really done anything that I felt like was worth it, was focused enough to show. But, last year I had a painting show and I'll probably do like a three or four month painting stint.

I just, the older I get the more I like working on one thing at a time and focusing on it and making it a project. And then when I'm done with it I'll do three or four months of painting and then I'll go back to music.

I had a dream last night. I had a dream last night that I was talking with Tom Waits. And we were talking about something and I was referencing a book. And he got out. He got out of his really fucked up artist brush. And he had some paint with him and he's like looking at the book and in order to make his points he was just painting onto the book that we were talking about. So, I've been doing watercolors while we've been talking in my notebook.

I stole from my dream.

Garrett: I always find it interesting to encounter people who aren't locked in a singular idea of what they're supposed to do because I mean I know growing up even if you're studying artists and whatnot who did a lot of different things you're sort of given this, and maybe it's an American idea I'm not totally sure, but this idea of the artist doing like, they are a painter or they are a composer or they are a filmmaker. And it's always the ones who never were settled in that that I found the most interesting, where it just all overlaps and feeds a larger piece that's not satisfied with just one medium.

Don: And there they always say you're not supposed to try and be more than one thing. But, to me they all feed together. I mean, why not? Who says?

Orson Welles (from Archive tape): Be of good heart. The fight is worth it. That just about means that my time is up. When my time's up it's time for me to say goodbye and to invite you please to join me at the same time, at the same station. Until then. Thanking you for your attention. I remain as always...

"To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking..."

Tape Extracts:

Garrett Tiedemann: So what did you find?

Don Chambers: Well, that I was really hungry, I was really hungry for getting back into song writing, but that's that's not really finding anything.

When I was a kid, there was nothing more satisfying than cutting the grass. Because you've got that immediate change of landscape and I like the immediacy of the songwriting process at the beginning stages when you're just making things up and having an immediacy in my songwriting I think the Last Thursday did give me more willingness to push myself further in taking chances with songwriting because one of the other keys to the Last Thursday was its limitation.

It's a great idea to give yourself a list of things that you can't do or some kind of limitations. So, you get things done, basically. I don't work well if I have too many choices. And the Last Thursday, because of the time limitation and I tried to do as much as I possibly could with the palette I had made for myself. And so moving back in the songwriting, I think it's given me the willingness to just push, push out further.

Johnny Cash with Woody Guthrie and with Dylan's 60s stuff. My first band before Vaudeville was called Cursing Alice. And we used to cover a lot of that and we were purposely acoustic because I was afraid if I picked up a electric guitar and got a couple of pedals that I wouldn't learn how to write a song.

So we kept it really simple at the beginning.

The themes, the general approach to the whole thing, it's a very visual show and the thing that I'm working on next is going to definitely pull in a lot of those themes and a lot of the visuals and turn it into something else. It was too fruitful here to to just leave it behind. But, I want to leave it behind as the thing that it was. I don't want to try and ever repeat that, at that place, with that set up because it was special in that way. Small theater, intimate, pretty much I had a mailing list. So the crowd was, a lot of the same people came every month and were along for this ride you know and we'll see what's going to happen next, what's going to be in the Christmas stocking.

I don't want to try and repeat anything like that, but it is folding into the next thing. I just, I'm just honestly I'm not sure I want to go there yet with talking about it.

Putting words to it, then it becomes somehow committed in your head to this is the way it is supposed to be even though you might have only said it to one or two people, but I think your brain starts to think oh, it's going in this direction. Right now, I'm pretty sure I see which direction the things going in, but it's gonna. I want to let it gestate for a while.

"Everything is to be had at such a bargain that it is questionable whether in the end there is anybody who will want to bid."

Tape Extracts:

Don Chambers: Andrei Tarkovsky talks a lot about poetics in film and the idea that he's making something that, the interpretation has as much to do with the audience as it does to do with the filmmaker and that they are trying to make a piece of art that, a piece of film, that is participatory and he's not giving you. It doesn't have a, it's not telling you what it is. It's allowing you to make it something.

I don't believe any technology should be a limitation. Dylan was a huge influence on that early on. I admire people who are willing to follow what's important and the monetary part of it is really not all that interesting. It would be lovely, but it's not interesting and it doesn't make good art. It might make a cooler looking video or get into a better studio, but...

It's Werner Herzog who, he talks about, he stole the camera from his film school to shoot his first movie. This kind of we've got to do this any way we can possibly do it and if you don't have the burn to be able to do that then you won't do it.

Garrett Tiedemann: The films that you did for these, did you make them or did you have other people help you make them?

Don: I made them. They're all over the place though. Some of some of them I filmed, some of them I took YouTube stuff and messed with it, mashed it up together, so it's a little bit of it's kind of across the board.

Garrett Tiedemann: And then when you play them would they be background or would they have their own place where the point was just...

Don: No they would have there they would have their own place.

Don Chambers (in film excerpt): I was recently hired to copy the Encyclopedia Britannica. My name is Jobez Wilson. I'm a pawn broker. My assistant recently drew my attention to an advertisement in the paper for an opening in the League of Red Headed Men. A foundation established by the late Ezakaya Hopkins to promote the interests of red headed men by paying them to perform small tasks. As my pawn shop had been in decline of late, this was a welcome opportunity. While there were many other red headed applicants waiting in line the day of the interview. Miraculously I was hired.

My job was to copy the pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I only had to provide pen and paper. I went home that evening in high spirits, but soon became perplexed. This must be some kind of hoax, or fraud. He's paid so well for such a simple task. This copying the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Well, the next day I arrived to the office at ten o'clock and everything was as it should be. Duncan Ross, my employer, started me off on the letter A and at two o'clock bid me good day and complemented me on the amount I had written. Every day I work a four hour shift copying and I was paid handsomely. The only stipulation of the job was that I must not leave the room during my shift.

Every day was the same and it suited me well.

Eight weeks later I was nearly finished with all the A entries and looked forward to moving onto the Bs when it all stopped. I went to the office that day only to see a sign tacked to the door. I was disappointed, I was confused, bewildered, so I turned to the only man in town who I thought could help.

Don: Second month was random. It was the theme. Pretty sure that's the month that I just with my iPhone I filmed clouds in the sky and for like ten second pieces of clouds in the sky. And I did that for the month. And then at the end put that all together and coupled it with some Charles Fort, the guy who wrote the first book that was all about anomalies and he collected frogs falling from the sky and you know just strange anomalies so I kind of mashed those two up together just to bring up some ideas.

I've gone through periods of time where I wished I was someone who could just get a job, buy a car, and have a nice house and come home and we'd have dinner and then we'd watch a movie and then we'd get to bed and you get up and do it again the next day.

Garrett Tiedemann: The ability to film and photograph so easily has created this thing where we are always at a distance in this ever need to document that we were there to begin with. But then you can't actually, even in being there, you can actually talk about what it was to be there so you can't narrativize it, you can't put it into your own story. That's what's really interesting about what you did. You created this microcosm of moments that people can then turn into their own story.

Don Chambers: Which is going to be better than what they were at.

It was like I set up a thing that I wanted to do. Initially it was only going to be three months and then it turned into the longer thing. Initially it was just going to be a winter thing. Even though it was crazy, from my point of view the first one was like beautiful and a fiasco. It had moments of beauty and moments of like utter terror. But, I was I want to do that again was my immediate response. I want to do it again, I want to get better at it. At this point I want to be a lot better at it and I'd like to do. But, that's down the road at this point.

The one thing that this did, the whole process did, was it didn't allow me to write. I wrote, I mean I wrote I was writing for the thing, but I wrote like two songs last year which in my work mode that's basically I took a year vacation from songwriting. And so I was really hungry to get back to that, which is what I'm involved in now.

You always want everything to come out exactly how you imagined it in your head. And of course, that's never the case. The best part of the Last Thursday was, or one of the things that I took away from it was that reminder of like, making art is not, you don't sit down and plan it out and then six months later you made what you planned out. If you do that, you'll be bored out of your mind.

Although, that was not my intention when I was doing the Last Thursday, but it was a good reminder of even though I thought I'd left things pretty open ended, it was a good reminder that if you're doing something that that has some life to it then it actually has its own consciousness about what it's going to do that you cannot control at all. And so that's when you're caught up in the thing and that's where the good stuff happens. That's where the sandbox is for you making something is when it's too much and you don't understand it. And. It's creating its own ideas. That's what you want to do in general whatever you're doing if you're a painter or a song maker or whatever. I mean it's all about getting outside of yourself. And If you can't get to the sandbox then you're the the person who planned something out, executes it, and that's great if you're a chef, but it doesn't work for art making. Then there's no strings showing, there's no vitality to the thing.

I've written plenty of songs that I knew as soon as I finished them, oh it's nothing more than what it is. It doesn't have any mystery in it because I didn't allow it to become wild and run away and do bad things and become out of my control. I need to not understand what I'm doing in order to make.

That's kind of key to what I do.

Making up a mystery that I don't understand and then playing around with it some and then if things go well it'll give me something back and I think this whole thing did that and gave me things back.

"We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art."

Tape Extracts:

Don Chambers (from show recording): For whom the phenomenon was supposed to have been presented to itself, had been caught cheating time and again. I believe in a hereafter and no greater blessing could be bestowed upon me than the opportunity once again to speak with my sainted mother who awaits me with open arms to press me to her heart in welcome. Just as she did when I entered this mundane sphere.

Garrett Tiedemann: I find myself asking this a lot because it's part of the main thing that I've been thinking about, looking at all this stuff, but is that film out anywhere or did you strictly make it to be shown that night.

Don Chambers: I strictly made it to be shown that.

Don Chambers (from show recording): There is one thing I'm going to ask for cooperation with and that's, a little later in the show, I'll remind you again, a little later in the show we're going to need complete silence and complete darkness. And therefore I'm going to ask you to turn your cell phones off, put em' in your pocket, put em' in your - not now, but a little later; you can still check your twitter account or whatever for the next thirty minutes or so, but at some point we're going to ask you not to leave the room for a brief period of time.

Garrett: It's one thing to do performance, whether it be music or spoken word. And then it's one thing to kind of combine. It's insanely complicated to put it all together.

Don: You should have told me that before we started.

Garrett: Yeah I know. What drove you to go for it all?

Don: I've never seen a show like that. I've never seen a show that could put all that together and I kind of just wanted to see if I could make it happen. You know, I think one of the takeaways from this is we probably needed about four people behind the scenes making this all happen if you wanted to do it on a less discombobulated, less less mistakes level. But, the fact that most of the time it was John and I doing all the heavy lifting meant that there was this random thing that fed through all of it.

There was definitely random mistakes that happened in every single one, of course. But, the reason I wanted to do it in the first place is because I hadn't seen anything like that. I like a lot of different things. I just thought, why aren't why are shows. For one thing most rock shows are for bands basically doing the same thing or three bands and they're basically doing the same thing for the evening and you like one you don't like the other whatever, you like all three of them.

But, why not make a...I wanted to make a contained thing that started at a certain time and ended at a certain time. That's another big thing about Athens is our shows here really start at 10 or 11 and they end at 2:00 in the morning.

Now that has its has its own built in. There is a theater to that. But it's, but it's a long drawn out theater that doesn't really like. I'm older now, I kind of want things I want to go in and get something really good and then get the hell out of there. And that's what I was trying to build.

Doing it this way, the audience never knew what was going to happen next. And I really like that aspect of it. Of course, the flipside of that was sometimes I didn't know what was going to happen next.

[from a recording of the show - John Barner is introduced to read An Halloween Poem to Delight My Younger Friends by Leonard Cohen]

Fewer and fewer moments that happened that you can't say I had this wonderful experience. Here's a video of it. And, to me it's not nearly as sexy not nearly as fun as just experience something and being able to talk about it. And. And. The only thing the person can experience from it is your enthusiasm or your wonder at having been a part of it. And. I'm much more interested in that. You know, I like going to shows where they have no photography no video signs on the walls because I want everybody to be present. I want to be present and in the moment of the thing happening.

Impassive frogs, skins stretched taut,grey with late October,the houses down my streetcrouched, unaware of each other.

Unaware of a significant windand mad children igniting heaps of rattling leavesand the desperate cry of desperate birds.

Dry, stuffed, squatting frogs.

I don’t know where the children got the birds.Certainly, there are few around my house. Oh,there is the occasional sparrow or robin or wren,but these were big birds.There were several turns of parcel twine abouteach bird to secure its wings and feet. It wasthat particularly hard variety of twine that can’tbe pulled apart but requires a knife or scissorsto be cut.I was so lost in the ritual that I’m not sure ifit was seven or eight they burnt.

(“The effluvia of festering bodies was so greatthat even the Mongols avoided such places andnamed them Moubaligh, City of Woe.”)

Soon they grew tired of the danceand removed the crepe-paper costumesand said prayers and made laments.

It was a quarter-to-ninewhen one bright youngsterincited the group to burn the frogs,which they did at nine.

(Now that I think about it, the birdsmust have been pigeons.)

If one of Temujin’s warriorstrapped a deer to eat,it was forbiddento slit its throat.The beast must be boundand the beast’s chest openedand the heart removedby the hunter’s hand.

Certain that she had made a good painting at last, she pedaled home from the studio in the moonlight, fervent and giddy with glee.

Tape Extracts:

Don Chambers: The first month, so I had never shown a film at Flicker before, at the place we did the thing. And the first month I got there and they're like oh well this cable doesn't work and this one doesn't work and we don't have a laptop. So I ended up, like, at the last minute, an hour before the show started, I drove around and someone said that I could borrow their laptop and I drove over to their house and they weren't home anymore.

So, then I ended up going to my house and getting my computer, bringing it in and setting it on a chair and just showing the film on the computer. And I didn't even get there until after the show had already started. So it just kind of set this tone.

People seem to enjoy watching someone else in a slight state of panic. I found myself, I did, I found myself at least for the first three or four months...then there was sound. You know one month the PA just didn't work; halfway through the show, stops working.

And you're trying to do this show that I was really thinking of, I wanted to present, like, to create an atmosphere. So those interruptions for me were terrible, but from an outside point of view audience people were like:

Oh that was great. I loved it that that happened.

Oh really, well I was panicking.

That happened, that happened for the first six months. And it was nobody. I mean it was everybody's fault and it was nobody's fault. It was just the way the shows seemed to go. But, that also created you know weird, like, I had my schedule of the show printed out for every show, but I would get so flustered by something not working and then I'd forget something else that was actually key to something that happened later in the show because they did have within a two hour window they would have some things would happen early on that needed to be fulfilled later. And I would just forget about one part or the other. So, it was in some ways a total disaster that I learned a lot from.

You know, we're doing these things in one month. And it would take me three or four days to recover from the last one. And then I'd find myself, like, all right. I didn't have any kind of pre-scheduled I want to do this or that. I had, I had a few notes on one page here; building office stuff and it was kind of little what do you want to do next every month. But I didn't really have a... I didn't have any kind of timeline for what I wanted to do for the year.

I made a theme's page and that was based off of either a theme, a story for my life, or a trick that I wanted to do.

Probably something I was reading at the time.

Well, the first one was hidden in plain sight and that was, the theme came about after I went out to Scull Shoals, John and I went out there, which is an abandoned town outside of Athens. It was abandoned at the turn of the 19th century. It was a town on a little river and it was flooded twice. And eventually the residents just gave the place up. So there's still some of the, there was a cotton mill there, there was a hospital there, there was like 3000 people lived in the town that eventually was abandoned. So, we went there to film that cause it's right outside Athens, not a lot of people know about it, and made a short, little film about it and that was the impetus for the first one, which was hidden.

Don Chambers (from show recording): Well, we've been doing this for ten months now. This is our tenth and final month of the Last Thursday. I think we're gonna need some duct tape. John can you grab some duct tape in the back, I think I left it on the shelf there. Always good to have duct tape for these shows.

I want to thank you for coming out. So these last ten months, among other things, we've had poetry, films, painting, and scripts; readings, body doubles, Shakespeare, and a little bit of murder. And finally tonight, with your help, we're going to try and recreate an early twentieth century, good ol' fashioned seance. We're going to try and conjure the dead. Anybody who is not comfortable with that, well you should have read the flyer.

The curtain rises on "[a] late evening in the future." Lit by the white light above a desk. Black-and-white imagery continues throughout. On the desk are a tape-recorder and a number of tins containing reels of recorded tape. A man consults a ledger. The tape he is looking to review is the fifth tape in Box 3. He reads aloud from the ledger but it is obvious that words alone are not jogging his memory.

Tape Exctracts:

Heather McIntosh: Kind of moved to Athens because of the music there. I love R.E.M. and Pylon and the B-52s. Playing in bands I was really fortunate to come into a crew of people that were like minded and making interesting things. You know, sort of experimenting in their own ways. Sort of, generation after, the generation after those R.E.M., Pylon sort of bands.

Don Chambers: It started with a drawing. Yeah, it started with A drawing. I really love the Beckett play Krapp's Last Tape.

I had always wanted to do this soloish show, built around that play idea.

I just had, I have a drawing of a table, sitting on an empty stage, with one bare light bulb above it and a chair and some recording equipment on the table. And then maybe, you know, you bring in a guitar or something, but that was kind of how I imagined.

I want to be free to go in a lot of different spaces artistically and emotionally - you know, from a ballad to a dirge to a rocker within one space. That was the impetus of vaudeville, but THIS was kind of taking the vaudeville idea of doing something, a variety show, minus the slapstick humor. I kind of thought it is somewhere between vaudeville theater and Dada theater of the absurd, you know. And also a little bit of just like a living room show that's really intimate like the Victorian parlor shows where so-and-so would read a poem and then so-and-so would play us a song and then here's my flower arrangement that I did last week and now we're gonna eat some food. I like that eclecticism and that's more of what it turned into. I think. Bringing in other people and bringing in other friends to play and do...I mean, there was all kinds of different things that went on over the course of the year. There was some comedy. There was, you know, a murder mystery theme night. It kind of bounced all over, all over the place.

Garrett Tiedemann: So each month, I mean I know like one of the things you and John shared with me you were the posters, so was each month sort of driven narratively by an idea like the idea that within this performance and within this telling is a narrative to break out if you want it to?

Don: Not a straight, it's very thematic, but not a narrative. But I was, it would be...

Garrett: You are presenting something or presenting a series of ideas that are cohesive within the moment.

Don: Yes. Yeah.

Everything, the magic the...I did some films as well and all of that for each month had to be. It all had. The ship had to be pointing in the same direction narratively.

It definitely shifted around and I don't know that I can step away, step back from it far enough to see if there was an overall tone to the thing that it created itself. There was also a hell of a lot of crazy mistakes that became...First, liked the first three months were just hell of everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

In 2015 Don Chambers hosted "a music and other things entertainment" each month called The Last Thursday. Each month had its own theme and governed not only the types of content, but way of presentation for the evening. These evenings lived and died in the moment with very little social media promotion or archiving.

In the second series of The White Whale we offer snippets of these evenings; providing first glimpses beyond the nights of what went down and why their existence foregoing online permanence is important.

I had a dream last night, I had a dream last night that I was talking with Tom Waits. And we were talking about something and I was referencing a book. And. He got out. He got out this really fucked up like brush, artist's brush. And he had some paint with him and he was looking at the book and in order to make his points he was just painting on to the book that we were talking about. So I've been doing watercolors while we've been talking in my notebook.

I think I started off reading Simulacra.

Disregard it.

If you want, the other thing I'd throw out as a ridiculous idea is if you wanted to do some e-mail exchanges, if you felt like you needed more language, we could do e-mail exchanges and then you or friend could just quote me. Like, maybe a girl, but I don't know, if you feel like it. I don't know, it's morning and I'm not sure what we talked about.